Lederer on Language

by Richard Lederer      Please explore my Web site at http://www.verbivore.com

NEW COLUMN EVERY FRIDAY

Continued from: Remembering the Great Charles Dickens

What the Dickens!

     Two centuries ago—on February 7, 1812—Charles John Huffam Dickens entered the earthly stage. Born into an impoverished family, his father having served a term in debtor's prison, Charles, worked as a child slave in a London blacking factory.

      The rags-to-riches life of Charles Dickens's was more remarkable than any of his stories. From such unpromising origins, he arose to become the best-selling writer of his time and one of the most enduring and quotable writers of all time.

      1. List as many titles as you can of Charles Dickens's 15 novels.
      2. In what Dickens novels do each of the following characters appear?: (a) Sam Weller (b) Bill Sykes (c) Little Nell (d) Mr. Pecksniff (e) Mr. Micawber (f) Esther Summerson (g) Thomas Gradgrind (h) Sydney Carton (i) Miss Havisham

      3. One signature of Dickens's quotable writing style is the great number of memorable opening sentences. Identify the Dickensian works that are launched by each of the following "button-holers":

      (a) "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . . ."

      (b) "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."

      (c) "Marley was dead, to begin with . . . . "

      (d) Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages will show."

      (e) "Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse . . . ."

      4.Dickens also bequeathed us some of the most whimsical and enduring names in all literature. Fill in the blanks for each of the following names:
      Scrooge, _____ Marley, _____ Cratchit, The Artful _____, _____ Magwitch, _____ Quilp, _____ Pickwick, _____ Squeers, Uriah _____

Answers

            1. Dickens's novels in chronological order: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, & c. The Personal History of  David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times for These Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished).
            2.  (a) The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (b) The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress (c) The Old Curiosity Shop (d)The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (e) The Personal History of  David Copperfield(f) Bleak House(g)Hard Times for These Times(h)A Tale of Two Cities (i) Great Expectations
3. (a) A Tale of Two Cities (b) Great Expectstions (c) A Christmas Carol (d) The Personal History of David Copperfield (e) The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress
4. Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, The Artful Dodger, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep

Remembering the Great Charles Dickens

Two centuries ago – on February 7, 1812 – Charles John Huffam Dickens entered the earthly stage. Born into an impoverished family, his father having served a term in debtor's prison, Charles, worked as a child slave in a London blacking factory. The rags-to-riches life of Charles Dickens's was more remarkable than any of his stories. From such unpromising origins, he arose to become the best-selling writer of his time and one of the most enduring and quotable writers of all time.

What has been described as the most successful writing career in history was launched when Dickens was 24. On March 31, 1836, he published the first installment of a comic novel about a bunch of bumbling gentlemen who knock about England getting into various scrapes. At the center of the group was one of the greatest comedy teams in all literature—Samuel Pickwick, a fat retired businessman, and a jaunty young cockney by the name of Sam Weller. The novel emerged as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, popularly known as The Pickwick Papers.

Following Pickwick came 14 more enormously popular novels, from The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress, to the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and hundreds of stories, including A Christmas Carol.

How did Dickens do it? First and foremost, he possessed a preternatural feel and ear for the hum and buzz of human life. People and situations endlessly flared up in his imagination; he said he could literally hear what his characters said before he wrote the words down. A supporting cast of more than 300 fantastic bit players floats in and out of Pickwick; over his career Dickens gave birth to thousands of characters.

Dickens not only wrote about people; he spoke to the people, who gobbled up every one of his books and stories. Like most of his works, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was published in serial form. The novel won a vast readership on both sides of the Atlantic, and as interest in the fate of the heroine, Little Nell, grew intense, circulation reached the staggering figure of 100,000. In New York, 6,000 people crowded the wharf where the ship carrying the final Master Humphrey's Clock magazine installment was due to dock. As it approached, the crowd's impatience grew to such a pitch that they surged forward and cried out as one to the sailors, "Does Little Nell die?"

Alas, Little Nell did die, and tens of thousands of readers' hearts shattered. The often ferocious literary critic Lord Jeffrey was found weeping with his head on his library table. "You'll be sorry to hear," he sobbed to a friend, "that little Nelly, Boz's little Nelly, is dead." Daniel O'Connell, an Irish M.P., burst out crying, "He should not have killed her," and then, in anguish, threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was traveling. A diary of the time records another reader lamenting, "The villain! The rascal! The bloodthirsty scoundrel! He killed my little Nell! He killed my sweet little child!"

James Nathan Miller describes the results of Dickens's literary empathy: "Incredibly, Dickens's career never had a pinnacle. It was all pinnacle. From, the appearance of Sam Weller in 1836 to the day in 1870 when Dickens died while writing The Mystery of Edwin.

Droid, his career was like a Roman candle that went straight up and just hung there, shooting one brilliant shower after another." We today are still being showered by those sparks, as witness the more than one hundred motion pictures made from Dickens's works. No wonder that G.K. Chesterton said of him:"Whatever the word great means, Dickens was what it means.”

Catch-22 and Other Titular Numbers

Fifty years ago, in 1961, Joseph Heller (1923-1999), an English professor at Penn State University, published his first novel, Catch-22. The working title for Heller's modern classic novel about the mindlessness of war was Catch-18, a reference to a military regulation that keeps the pilots in the story flying one suicidal mission after another. The only way to be excused from flying such missions is to be declared insane, but asking to be excused is proof of a rational mind and bars excuse.

Shortly before the appearance of Heller's book in 1961, Leon Uris's Mila 18 was published. To avoid confusion with the title of Uris's war novel, Heller and his editor decided to change Catch-18 to Catch-22. The choice turned out to be both fortunate and fortuitous as the 22 more rhythmically and symbolically captures the double duplicity of both the military regulation itself and the bizarre world that Heller shapes in the novel. ("That's some catch, that Catch-22," observes Yossarian. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agrees.)

During the five decades since its literary birth, Catch-22 has become one of ther most popular and revered of twentieth-century American novels. And catch-22, generally lower-cased, has come to mean any predicament in which we are caught coming and going and in which the very nature of the problem denies and defies its solution. So succinctly does catch-22 embody the push-me-pull-you absurdity of modern life that the compound has become the most frequently employed and deeply embedded allusion from all of American literature.

When a number of books he had lent were not returned, Sir Walter Scott quipped, "My friends may not be good in mathematics, but they are excellent book-keepers." Authors are sometimes unmathematical, but the numbers they place in some of their titles are often significant to the stories themselves.

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, for example, the title turns out to be the temperature at which book paper ignites, an important figure in a society that employs firemen not to save houses but to burn down houses—houses suspected of containing books.

Using the name of each author (or source) and each embedded number, provide the title of each work:
1. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (1)
2. Ken Kesey (1)
3. T. H. White (1)
4. William Shakespeare (2)
5. Charles Dickens (2)
6. Richard Henry Dana (2)
7. Alexandre Dumas (3)
8. Anton Chekhov (3)
9. John Dos Passos (3)
10. T. S. Eliot (4)
11. Arthur Conan Doyle (4)
12. Kurt Vonnegut (5)
13. Ernest Hemingway (5)
14. Arthur Conan Doyle (5)
15. Luigi Pirandello (6)
16. A. A. Milne (6)
17. W. Somerset Maugham (6)
18. Nathaniel Hawthorne (7)
19. Nicholas Meyer (7)
20. Aeschylus (7)
21. T. E. Lawrence (7)
22. Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II (7)
23. Richard Wright (8)
24. John O'Hara (8)
25. J. D. Salinger (9)
26. Dorothy L. Sayers (9)
27. Agatha Christie (10)
28. John Reed (10)
29. William Shakespeare (12)
30. Reginald Rose (12)
31. Booth Tarkington (17)
32. Leon Uris (18)
33 A. E. Housman (21)
34. John Buchan (39)
35. John Dos Passos (42)
36. Thomas Pynchon (49)
37. Harold Robbins (79)
38. Jules Verne (80)
39. Helene Hanff (84)
40. Victor Hugo (93)
41. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100)
42. Dodie Smith (101)
43. Marquis de Sade (120)
44. Arthur Schlesinger (1,000)
45. Arabian folk tales (1,001)
46. Arthur C. Clarke (2,001)
47. Jules Verne (20,000)
48. Ernest Hemingway (50,000)
49. Mark Twain (1,000,000)
50. O. Henry (4,000,000)

Answers

1. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 3. The Once and Future King 4.Two Gentleman of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen (with John Fletcher) 5. A Tale of Two Cities 6. Two Years Before the Mast 7. The Three Musketeers 8. The Three Sisters 9. Three Soldiers 10. Four Quartets,

11. "The Sign of Four" 12. Slaughterhouse-Five 13. The Fifth Column 14. "The Five Orange Pips" 15. Six Characters In Search of an Author 16. Now We Are Six 17. The Moon and Sixpence 18. The House of the Seven Gables 19. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution 20. Seven Against Thebes

21. Seven Pillars of Wisdom 22. Seven Days in May 23. Eight Men 24. Butterfield 8 25. Nine Stories 26. The Nine Tailors 27. Ten Little Indians 28. Ten Days That Shook the World 29. Twelfth Night 30. Twelve Angry Men

31. Seventeen 32. Mila 18 33. "When I was One-and-Twenty" 34. The Thirty-Nine Steps 35. The 42nd Parallel 36. The Crying of Lot 49 37. 79 Park Avenue 38. Around the World in Eighty Days 39. 84, Charing Cross Road 40. Ninety-Three

41. One Hundred Years of Solitude 42. 101 Dalmatians 43. One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom 44. The Thousand Days 45. The Thousand and One Nights 46. 2001: A Space Odyssey 47. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea 48. "Fifty Grand" 49. "The 1,000,000 Bank-Note" 50. The Four Million

Halloween Humor in a Jugular Vein

Three vampires went into a bar and sat down. A buxom barmaid came over to take their orders. The vampires tried to be neck romancers, so they batted their eyes and flirted with her by telling her how much they liked her blood type. But she rebuffed them with the reply “O negative” and asked, "And what would you, er, gentlemen like tonight?"

The first vampire said, "I'll have a mug of blood."

The second vampire said, "I'll have a mug of blood."

The third vampire shook his head at his companions and said, "I’ll have a glass of plasma."

The barmaid called out to the bartender, "Two bloods and a blood light!"

Then they all toasted each other by shouting, “This blood’s for you!”

Vampires love to drink blood because they find it thicker than water. In fact, we know a vampire who was fired as night watchman at a blood bank. They caught him drinking on the job, thus making too many unauthorized withdrawals. And he took too many coffin breaks.

Long ago vampires sailed to the United States in blood vessels and set up their own terror-tories. Many of them settled in the Vampire State, and others went west and became batboys for the Colorado Rockies’ Horror Picture Show. Some went on to college and earned a place in Phi Batta Cape-a. Others perfected their skills at sucking blood by attending law school.

Vampires from all over the world gather each fall deep in the forests of Transylvania to renew their commitment to their calling. They reverently view the scroll, written and signed in blood, that contains their history and lists their rites and responsibilities. Then, at midnight, they stand at attention and swear allegiance to the Draculation of Vein Dependence.

The most famous of all vampires is, of course, Count Dracula, the notorious neck-rophiliac. He can be a real pain in the neck, but he can get under your skin. Even if he pays for dinner, he’ll still put the bite on you.

Dracula once fell in love at first fright with the girl necks door. She was six feet tall, and Dracula loves to suck up to women. But he’s remained a bat-chelor his whole life because anytime he courts another vampire, they end up at each other’s throats. Or he finds out that his sweetie just isn’t his blood type.
And any mortal woman to whom Dracula is attracted soon realizes that life with him will be an unfailingly draining experience, so she’s not likely to stick her neck out for him. It’s hard to get a good night’s sleep with him because of the terrible coffin.

Moreover, Dracula isn’t a very attractive fellow, in large part because he can’t see himself in the bat room mirror and is thus unable to brush his teeth, comb his hair, or tie his tie. This causes bat breath and the disease Dracula fears most – tooth decay.

The fiend went to the dentist to correct his bite, but he still ended up with false teeth, which for him are new-fangled devices that, like Dracula himself, come out at night.

Dracula finds his victims in any neck of the woods and as he sucks their blood, he sings, "Fangs for the Mammaries!" or "You're So Vein" and "Fangs for ther Mammaries!" Whenever the police come after him, the count simply explains that he is a law-a-biting citizen. He loves the deep plots and grave setting of a cemetery, especially when the temperature rises above 90 degrees. Dracula often sighs, “There’s nothing like a cold bier and a bloody Mary on a hot day.”

Sometimes Dracula has to wait interminably to emerge from his coffin. To him it seems that the sun never sets on the brutish vampire.

The Attraction of Opposites

What do you make of the fact that we can talk about certain things and ideas only when they are absent? Once they appear, our blessed English language doesn't allow us to describe them. Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, sheveled, gruntled, chalant, plussed, ruly, gainly, maculate, kempt, pecunious, peccable, or souciant?

English is a language populated with a lot of heads without tails and odds without ends. In his poem “Gloss,” David McCord spoofs the ability of the English language to identify negatives but not the corresponding positives:

I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? Extro-?No, he’s just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.

When life turns sipid and the mind is traught,
The spirit soars as I would sist it ought.
Chalantly then, like any gainly goof,
My digent self is sertive, choate, loof.

Have you ever met a sung hero or experienced requited love? I know people who are no spring chickens, but where, pray tell, are the people who are spring chickens? Where are the people who actually would hurt a fly? All the time I meet people who are great shakes, who actually do squat, who can cut the mustard, who can fight City Hall, who are my cup of tea, who would lift a finger to help, who would give you the time of day, and whom I would touch with a ten-foot pole, but I can't talk about them in English—and that is a laughing matter.

A slim chance and a fat chance are the same, as are a caregiver and a caretaker, a bad licking and a good licking, and "What's going on?" and "What's coming off?" But a wise man and a wise guy are opposites. How can sharp speech and blunt speech be the same and quite a lot and quite a few the same, while overlook and oversee are opposites? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the next?

If button and unbutton and tie and untie are opposites, why are loosen and unloosen and ravel and unravel the same? If bad is the opposite of good, hard the opposite of soft, and up the opposite of down, why are badly and goodly, hardly and softly, and upright and downright not opposing pairs? If harmless actions are the opposite of harmful actions, why are shameful and shameless behavior the same and pricey objects less expensive than priceless ones?

If appropriate and inappropriate remarks and passable and impassable mountain trails are opposites, why are flammable and inflammable materials, heritable and inheritable property, and passive and impassive people the same? How can valuable objects be less valuable than invaluable ones? If uplift is the same as lift up, why are upset and set up opposite in meaning? Why are pertinent and impertinent, canny and uncanny, and famous and infamous neither opposites nor the same? How can raise and raze and reckless and wreckless be opposites when each pair contains the same sound? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress?

Why is it that when the sun or the moon or the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible; that when I clip a coupon from a newspaper I separate it, but when I clip a coupon to a newspaper, I fasten it. And how can it be that when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this column, I end it?

Good Words From the Good Book

This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the completion and printing of the most famous translation of the Bible, the King James version.

James I, who fancied himself a scholar and theologian, decided to assure his immortality by sponsoring a new Bible worthy of the splendor of his kingdom. To this end, James appointed a commission of fifty-four learned clerical and lay scholars, divided into three groups in Cambridge, Westminster, and Oxford. Seven years of loving labor, 1604- 1611, produced what John Livingston Lowes called "the noblest monument of English prose." Few readers would dissent from that verdict.

While the spiritual values of the Bible are almost universally recognized, the enduring effect of the Bible on the English language is often overlooked. The fact is, though, that a great number of biblical words, references, and expressions have become part of our everyday speech, so that even people who don't read the Bible carry its text on their tongues.

Here are ten biblically inspired words, each of which you are asked to identify. Answers immediately follow the quiz.

1. In ancient times, a _______ was a unit of weight, and this weight of silver or gold constituted a monetary unit, one that figures prominently in a famous parable of Jesus: "For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five _______s, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability." (Matthew 25:14-15)

The most common modern meaning of the word _______–some special, often God-given ability or aptitude–is a figurative development from the parable.

2. An obstacle: "Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a _______ before the blind, but shalt fear thy God." (Leviticus 19:14)

3. A special celebration: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a _______ unto you." (Leviticus 25:10)

4. "Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept." (Mark 16:9-10) Mary Magdalene became a favorite subject of medieval and Renaissance painters, who traditionally depicted her as weeping. The tearful Mary was portrayed so sentimentally that, over the years, her name has been transformed into the word _______, which has come to mean "tearfully sentimental."

5. A final, decisive battle, marked by overwhelming slaughter: "And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue _______ . . . And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great." (Revelation 16:16,18)

6. Anything of enormous size: "Behold now _______, which I made with thee. . . Behold, he drinketh up a river and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth." (Job 40:15, 23).

7. Anything of enormous size: "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish _______ the piercing serpent, even _______ that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." (Isaiah 27:1)

8. "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!"

This is a typically dark passage in one of the prophetic books, from which we derive the word _______, meaning a sorrowful tirade, extended lament, or bitter denunciation.

9. "Then the Lord of the _______ gathered them together for to offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoice." (Judges 16:23)

Because the nation described above were an alien, non-Semitic people who worshiped strange gods, their name became a term for a foreigner. Nineteenth-century philosophers, such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, further changed the meaning of the word so that today _______ is a derogatory term for one who shuns intellectual and cultural activities.

10. In Judges 12:5-6, we learn about a conflict between the peoples of Gilead and Ephraim: "And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites; and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; then they said unto him, Say now _______" (Judges 12:5-6).

Because the Ephraimites didn't have the sh sound in their language, they could not pronounce the word correctly, and 42,000 of them were slain. That's how the word _______ has acquired the meaning that it has today: a password, catchword, or slogan that distinguishes one group from the other.

Answers
1. talent 2. stumbling block 3. jubilee 4. maudlin 5. armageddon 6. behemoth 7. leviathan 8. jeremiad 9. philistine 10. shibboleth

Holy Moses!

Four hundred years ago, in 1611, the most renowned of all biblical translations was completed and printed. Among the many wonders of the King James Bible is that it stands as one of the few great accomplishments achieved by a committee.

Another of its amazements is that, along with the works of William Shakespeare, the King James Bible is the most fruitful source of everyday phrases in the English speaking world.

Many such expressions are direct borrowings, such as "kingdom come," in Matthew 6:10, and "the eleventh hour," from Matthew's version of Jesus's parable of the workers in the vineyard who gained employment so late in the day (Matthew 20:6).

Others have entered our modern idiom in a slightly revised form, as "crystal clear" (from "clear as crystal" in Revelation 22:1) and "by the skin of my teeth." The latter echoes Job's lament in Job 19:20: "My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth" ("by the skin of my teeth" in the Revised Standard Version). "But teeth don't have any skin," you protest. In the biblical phrase, the "skin" refers to a margin of safety as thin as the enamel on the teeth.

In the Song of Solomon 7:4, the beloved is told, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory." From this comparison derives the modern cliché "an ivory tower," which picks up the sense of beauty, loftiness, and unassailability implied by the original words.

Still other expressions are general references to a biblical story, like "to raise Cain" and "Adam's apple," so called because many men, but few women, exhibit a bulge of laryngeal cartilage in front of their throats. According to male-dominated folklore, Eve swallowed her apple without care or residue, while a chunk of the fruit stuck in the throat of the innocent and misled Adam.

Here, listed in the order they occur in the King James Bible, are 50 biblical turns of phrase that have survived the centuries pretty much unscathed. Complete each item. Answers appear right after the quiz.

1. Saw the ______ (Genesis 1:4)
2. My brother's _______ (Genesis 4:9)
3. Sold his _______ for a mess of _______ (Genesis 25:33-34)
4. The _______ of the land (Genesis 45:18)
5. A land flowing with _______ and _______ (Exodus 3:17)
6. Man doth not live by _______ alone (Deuteronomy 8:3)
7. The _______ of his eye (Deuteronomy 32:10)
8. A hair's _______ (Judges 20:16)
9. A man after his own _______ (I Samuel 13:14)
10. Played the ____ (I Samuel 26:21)
11. A still small _______ (I Kings 19:12)
12. Weeping and _______ (Esther 4:3)
13. Give up the _______ (Job 3:11)
14. In the land of the _______ (Job 28:13)
15. Out of the mouths of _______ (Psalms 8:2)
16. His heart's _______ (Psalms 10:3)
17. At their wit's _______ (Psalms 107:27)
18. Labor in _______ (Psalms 127:1)
19. Out of the _______ (Psalms 130:1)
20. Pride goeth. . . before a _______ (Proverbs 16:18)
21. Vanity of _______ (Ecclesiastes 1:2)
22. There is nothing new under the _______ (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
23. Eat, drink, and be _______ (Ecclesiastes 8:15)
24. As white as _______ (Isaiah: 1:18)
25. They shall beat their _______ into _______ (Isaiah 2:4)
26. Woe is _______! (Isaiah 6:5)
27. See eye to _______ (Isaiah 52:8)
28. Holier than _______ (Isaiah 65:5)
29. Weighed in the _______ (Daniel 5:27)
30. Salt of the _______ (Matthew 5:13)
31. Good for _______ (Matthew 5:13)
32. An eye for an _______, and a tooth for a _______ (Matthew 5:38)
33. Pearls before _______ (Matthew 7:6)
34. House _______ against itself (Matthew 12:25)
35. Fell by the _______ (Matthew 13:4)
36. Signs of the _______ (Matthew 16:3)
37. A den of _______ (Matthew 21:13)
38. Blood _______ (Matthew 27:6)
39. In his right _______ (Mark 5:15)
40. Physician, _______ thyself (Luke 4:23)
41. A law unto _______ (Romans 2:14)
42. The powers that _______ (Romans 13:1)
43. It is high _______ (Romans 13:11)
44. In the twinkling of an _______ (I Corinthians 15:52)
45. A _______ in the flesh (II Corinthians 12:7)
46. Labor of _______ (I Thessalonians 1:3)
47. The root of all _______ (I Timothy 6:10)
48. Keep the _____ (II Timothy 4:7)
49. Cover a _______ of sins (I Peter 4:8)
50. Bottomless _______ (Revelation 9:1, 20:1)

Answers
1. light 2. keeper 3. birthright, pottage 4. fat 5. milk, honey 6. bread 7. apple 8. breadth 9. heart 10. fool
11. voice 12. wailing 13. ghost 14. living 15. babes 16. desire 17. end
18. vain 19. depths 20. fall
21. vanities 22. sun 23. merry 24. snow 25. swords, plowshares 26. me 27. eye 28. thou 29. balances 30. earth
31. nothing 32. eye, tooth 33. swine 34. divided 35. wayside 36. times 37. thieves 38. money 39. mind 40. heal
41. themselves 42. be 43. time 44. eye 45. thorn 46. love 47. evil 48. faith 49. multitude 50. pit

Jest for the Pun of It

This past May 21, Gary Hallock invited pun-up girls and pun gents from all around the whirled world to sharpen their pun cells at the 35st Annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, in Austin, Texas.
Austin was recently listed in Parade magazine as America's Funniest City. It's the capital of Texas and the perfect place for capital pun-ishment. The Pun-Off, held nearby the 1891 home of turn-of-the century short story writer O. Henry, began in 1977 and typically attracts upwards of 500 pundits and punheads. “They just keep coming back because everybody is so annual retentive,” winks Hallock, the event’s lone arranger and cheerman of the bored. “We don’t mind people who are not punsters in the audience because we can enroll them in our Witless Protection Program.”

As International Punster of the Year, an honor I received in 1990 from the International Save the Pun Foundation, I was invited to be a judge at this punderful example of Americana. I continue to bask in the bright afterglow of my rewording experience at the Pun-Off. The throng may be over, but the malady lingers on.

Punsters can compete in two events. In "Punniest of Show," entrants have up to two minutes to perform a prepared monologue on a pun-laced topic of their choice. They are judged on quantity, creativity, and originality of their puns, as well as delivery and audience reaction.

In the "Punslinging" event, contestants shoot from the lip and from the quip at each other, two or three at a time, dueling and fooling with a topic given on the spot. Subjects included external fairy tales, movie titles, documents, and sailing, and each punslinger was allotted five seconds to fire off a topical prey on words. When combatants run out of bullet surprises, they’re outta there. The last punslinger standing–this year it was Benjamin Ziek, of Glendale, CA–wins the coveted first-place trophy. It’s shaped like the nether part of a cat--a blue ribbin’ in the form of a cat ass trophy. Get it?.

Gracie Deegan, a 25-year-old newcomer from Austin, was voted Punniest of Show, garnering 39 of a possible 40 points from the judges. As for Gracie's monologue, energetically delivered from memory, let's get right to wit:
WMGeez, y'all, I am really worried about the Middle East. This threat is constant and ample. Now, I don't mean to Babylon and on, but this is Anwar we bedouin, or else we're all duned!

Yes, this problem Isreal, and we mosque not back out beGaza of something silly like Angoraphobia. Osama countries haven't exactly Bin Ladin us lately, and they won't be able to stan Americans if Tehran away from Oman in need. I know it'sQandahar, but this is Mecca important, and if Ayatollah once, I'll tell you twice–Palestine to get to the Beirut of this problem. Hussein we can't bring peace to the Middle East once Afghan? It just can't Kuwait Now can I get a HalleFallujah!?

This is a Syria situation, for shah, and if we don't find a solution Sunni, I Farsi that the Shiite is really gonna hit the fan. Iraq my Bahrain night and day, but this is just Eden me up inside.

Allah people say that less is Momar and we should just Qatar losses and run, but I don't think we Otta, man, and Meirs can't even harem. Oil be Saddamed if Iran from everything that scares me. If Euphrates of something, be a Tigris, don't be a Turkey. And, if you Dubai into the fear, well, you're just Aden the terrorists.

All of which goes to show that a good pun is like a good steak–a rare medium well done. And don't you go beefing and stewing about my meaty puns.

Do You Remember Ma?

The earliest tributes to mothers date back to the annual spring festival the Greeks dedicated to Rhea, the mother of many deities, and to the offerings ancient Romans made to their Great Mother of Gods, Cybele. Christians celebrated this festival on the fourth Sunday in Lent in honor of Mary, mother of Christ. In England this holiday was expanded to include all mothers and was called Mothering Sunday.

In the United States, Mother's Day started nearly 150 years ago, when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community, a cause she believed would be best advocated by mothers. She called it Mother's Work Day.

Fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist, suffragist and author of the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," organized a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace, since she believed they bore the loss of human life more harshly than anyone else.

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made Mother's Day a national holiday to be celebrated each year on the second Sunday of May. In honor of this apparent day, let’s celebrate some words that have one thing in common. They all end with the letters MA, an affectionate shortening of mother. From each definition, identify each word whose ending is brought up by MA.

Example: American president: Obama.

Hint: the words occur in alphabetical order.

I’ll avoid all those generally unpleasant medical terms, such as asthma, carcinoma, coma, eczema,edema, emphysema, enema, glaucoma, hematoma, melanoma, plasma, sarcoma, and trauma.

Answers repose at the end of the game.

1. a person or thing despised or cursed
2. a pleasant odor
3. according to Hinduism, the essence from which all life originates
4. an unusual ability to influence people and arouse devotion
5. motion pictures
6. a punctuation mark
7. a problem that requires a choice between equally undesirable solutions
8. what you get at graduation
9. a system of principles or doctrines
10. the chief monetary unit of Greece
11. a play
12. something that is ambiguous or puzzling
13. in Hinduism and Buddhism, the principle that one's actions determine
one's future in this life or in other incarnations
14. a priest who adheres to the form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet and Mongolia
15. woolly-haired mammal of South America
16. what Gandhi was
17. a full, wide view of an extensive area
18. a large wild American cat; mountain lion; cougar
19. a long-lasting mark or stain on one's character or reputation
20. solid earth
Special challenges: Name two American states that end in MA. Name the third and 18th letters of the Greek alphabet.
Answers

1. anathema 2. aroma 3. Brahma 4. charisma 5. cinema 6. comma 7. dilemma 8. diploma 9. dogma 10. drachma
11. drama 12. enigma 13. karma (Watch out, or my karma will run over your dogma!) 14. lama 15. llama 16. mahatma 17. panorama 18. puma 19. stigma 20. terra firma
Special challenges: Alabama and Oklahoma; gamma and sigma

My Favorite Tennis Jokes

Once upon a time, the New Hampshire Lawn Tennis Association sponsored a slogan contest. From its beginnings, the organization's letterhead symbol had been two crossed tennis racquets, and the group's president offered a prize, a can of tennis balls, to the member who could serve up the spinniest slogan to go with the logo.

Since I have been an incorrigible (and encourageable) punster all my life, the challenge stirred my blood. As I bounced around a few ideas, I realized what a matchless set-up this contest was. With low overhead I could drive home my point for a net gain.
Immediately I recalled from my childhood the story of the two cats who were watching a tennis match. One turned to the other and said, "You know, my mother's in that racquet."

I was having a high-strung gut reaction.

Then I had a stroke of good luck. I decided to do some research for my slogan by reading the world's greatest writers of tennis books. So I opunned the books of Robert W. Service and Miguel Cervantes, Lord Byron and Richard Lovelace, Honore de Balzac and Joseph Addison, and Ivy Compton Burnet and Kurt Vonnegut. And of course, I read the works of the two greatest authors of all time -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Tennis E. Williams.

I discovered rich literary gold -- Point Counterpoint (the story of Martina Navratilova vs, Chris Evert), Love Story (Stefie Graf in her heyday), Volley of the Dolls (the women's tennis tour), Winterset (indoor tennis), and King Lear (the biographies of Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe).

Now I was ready to write my slogans. Linesmen ready? Here they are:

• Shake hands with our racquet.
• We're dedicated to faultless services in New Hampshire.
• We deliver a smashing opportunity.
• Our service will improve your service.

Apparently the panel of judges reacted like a cross court. They wondered what the deuce I was doing writing these base lines. So as a backhanded compliment, they declared as the winner my fifth slogan, the one that didn't have any pun in it at all: "The sport for a lifetime in the state for a lifetime." And why not? It was the one with the American twist!

More courtly jokes:

Where is the first tennis match mentioned in the Bible?
When Joseph served in Pharaoh’s court.

Why should you never fall in love with a tennis player?
To them, “love” means nothing.

How many tennis players does it take to screw in a light bulb?
“What do you mean the bulb was out? It wasn’t out, it was in!”

What’s the definition of endless love?
Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder playing tennis

Why is tennis such a noisy game?
Because each player raises a racket.

As you get older, you play more doubles because then there's twice the chance that somebody will remember the score.

To err is human. To blame your partner is doubles.

Playing With Accordion Words

Garnering twelve Academy Award nominations and four Oscars, including Best Picture, The King's Speech became, on February 28, the most honored film of the year. Among its many excellencies is the double entendre in its title. The word Speech in The King's Speech means the speaking of George VI, the stammerer who did not want to become king. At the same time and in the same space, the word Speech means the particular address, in 1939, that King George VI delivered to his British subjects exhorting them to join in battle against the Germans.

In other words, Speech in the context of this triumphant film is an accordion word.

Like people, words grow after they are born. Once created, words seldom sit still and remain the same forever. Some words expand to take over larger territories: Once fabulous meant "resembling or based on a fable." Later came the expanded meaning, "incredible and marvelous." A holiday first signified "a holy day," but modern holidays include secular days, such as Valentine's Day and Independence Day. Other words have traveled in the opposite direction. Meat began life as "food" and liquor as "drink." Once an undertaker could undertake to do anything; nowadays undertakers specifically manage funerals. These words have narrowed considerably.

Some of our most intriguing words, such as speech, have retained both their broad and narrow meanings. These words expand and contract like an accordion. We know how big or small they are by their context.

Take the accordion word time. Time can refer to vast periods, as in "Over time, humans have built civilization." Or time can refer to a few hours: "We had a good time at the Quimbys' party." Or time can be a specific moment: "What time is it?"

Similarly, day can signify an era: "In my day, we shoveled coal to heat the house"; a 24-hour span: "What day do I start work?"; or the daylight hours of a 24-hour span: "day and night." The second and third meanings work together in Bill Hicks's quip "I sleep eight hours a day. And at least ten at night."

Then there's the word animal, which can be used at two levels in a hierarchy of inclusion: First, animal can mean anything living that does not grow from the earth, as in "animal, vegetable or mineral." In this context animal includes human beings, beasts, birds, fishes, and insects. Second, animal can refer to beasts only, in contrast with human beings, as in "man and the animals share dominance of the earth."

The use of man, above, yields another accordion word. Although the noun has come under increasing attack as sexist, man is still employed to refer both to all of humankind, as in Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, and to only the male members of our species, as in "man and woman." Similar is the word gay, which can designate all homosexuals, as in "gay rights," or only male homosexuals, as in "the gay and lesbian community."

Business started out as a general term meaning literally "busy-ness." After several centuries of life, business picked up the narrower meaning of "commercial dealings." In 1925 Calvin Coolidge used the word in both its generalized an specialized senses when he stated, "The chief business of the American people is business." We today can see the word starting to generalize back to its first meaning in phrases like "I don't like this funny business one bit."

Here's an alphabetical list of other accordion words. I'll leave it to you to identify their broad and narrow meanings: American, body, breast, country, dress, drink, earth, gentleman, land, picture, politics, segregate, temperature, and verse.

Samuel Goldwyn once observed, "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." Obviously the movie mogul used verbal to mean "oral," as do most speakers of American English. But verbal (Latin verbum, "word") communication involves words spoken or written, as in "I'm trying to improve my verbal skills." In this sense, Goldwyn's Goldwynism isn't so funny after all.

It’s Okay to Occasionally SpliT an Infinitive

“Many years ago, when I was a junior in Thornton Academy in Saco, Maine, I was instructed never, under pain of sin, to split an infinitive,” wrote one of my column readers. Note the expression “under pain of sin.” It speaks of the priestly power of the English teacher to interpret the verbal nature of the universe and to bring down from some kind of Mount Sinai commandments for the moral and ethical use of the Word.
     A split infinitive (“to better understand,” “to always disagree”) occurs when an adverb or adverbial construction is placed between to and a verb. In a famous New Yorker cartoon, we see Captain Bligh sailing away from the Bounty in a rowboat and shouting, “So, Mr. Christian! You propose to unceremoniously cast me adrift?” The caption beneath the drawing reads: “The crew can no longer tolerate Captain Bligh’s ruthless splitting of infinitives.”
     When infinitives are cleft, some schoolmarms, regardless of sex or actual profession, become exercised. Once again we confront the triumph of mandarin decree over reality, of mummified code over usage that actually inhales and exhales — another passionate effort by the absolutists to protect the language from the very people who speak it.
     No reputable authority on usage, either in England or in the United States, bans the split infinitive, and major writers — Phillip Sidney, John Donne, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Coleridge, Emily Bronte, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry James, and Willa Cather (to name a dozen out of thousands) — have been blithely splitting infinitives ever since the early fourteenth century. Thus, when I counsel my readers and listeners to relax about splitting infinitives, I am not, to slightly paraphrase Star Trek, telling them to boldly go where no one has gone before. Several studies of modern literary and journalistic writing reveal that a majority of newspaper and magazine editors would accept a sentence using the words “to instantly trace” and that the infinitive is cleft in 19.8 percent of all instances where an adverb appears.
     The prohibition of that practice was created in 1762 out of whole cloth by one Robert Lowth, an Anglican bishop and self-appointed grammarian. Like Dryden’s anti-terminal-preposition rule, Lowth’s anti-infinitive-splitting injunction is founded on models in the classical tongues. But there is no precedent in these languages for condemning the split infinitive because in Greek and Latin (and all the other romance languages) the infinitive is a single word that is impossible to sever.
     Like Winston Churchill, writers George Bernard Shaw and James Thurber had been stylistically hassled by certain know-it-alls once too often. Shaw struck back in a letter to the Times of London: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of time to chasing split infinitives. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or to quickly go or quickly to go. The important thing is that he should go at once.” With typical precision, concision, and incision, Thurber wrote to a meddlesome editor, “When I split an infinitive, it is going to damn well stay split!”
     I’m pleased to announce that a closely guarded secret can now be revealed. Working in a remote area of a top-secret grammar complex, a team of linguistic scientists has succeeded in splitting the infinitive. They placed a stockpile of fissionable gerunds and radio-active participles, encased in leaden cliches to prevent con-fusion, in a machine of their own invention called the infinitron. The effect of the bombardment is to dissociate the word to from its main verb until at length an adverb splits an infinitive and is glowingly ejected from the infinitron. But not to worry. The only explosions emanate from Bishop Robert Lowth and his spiritual progeny — those whom Henry W. Fowler, in his dictionary of Modern English Usage, describes as people who “betray by their practice that their aversion to the split infinitive springs not from instinctive good taste, but from the tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinions of others.”
     I do not advocate that you go about splitting infinitives promiscuously and artlessly. But there is no point in mangling a sentence just to avoid a split infinitive. If infinitive splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!

50 Rules for Writing Good

English teachers and journalists have been passing around a list of self-contradictory rules of usage for more than a century, and we’ve been collecting and creating them for almost half of one. I offer you one of the largest accumulations gathered into a single space. Whatever you think of these slightly cracked nuggets of rhetorical wisdom, just remember that all generalizations are bad.

1. Each pronoun should agree with their antecedent.
2. Between you and I, pronoun case is important.
3. A writer must be sure to avoid using sexist pronouns in his writing.
4. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
5. Don't be a person whom people realize confuses who and whom.
6. Never use no double negatives.
7. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. That is something up with which your readers will not put.
8. When writing, participles must not be dangled.
9. Be careful to never, under any circumstances, split infinitives.
10. Hopefully, you won't float your adverbs.
11. A writer must not shift your point of view.
12. Lay down and die before using a transitive verb without an object.
13. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
14. The passive voice should be avoided.
15. About sentence fragments.
16. Don't verb nouns.
17. In letters themes reports and ad copy use commas to separate items in a series.
18. Don't use commas, that aren't necessary.
19. “Don't overuse ‘quotation marks.’”
20. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (if the truth be told) superfluous.
21. Contractions won't, don't, and can't help your writing voice.
22. Don't write run-on sentences they are hard to read.
23. Don't forget to use end punctuation
24. Its important to use apostrophe's in the right places.
25. Don’t abbrev.
26. Don’t overuse exclamation marks! ! !
27. Resist Unnecessary Capitalization.
28. Avoid mispellings.
29. Check to see if you any words out.
30. One-word sentences? Never.
31. Avoid annoying, affected, and awkward alliteration, always.
32. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
33. The bottom line is to bag trendy locutions that sound flaky.
34. By observing the distinctions between adjectives and adverbs, you will treat your readers real good.
35. Parallel structure will help you in writing more effective sentences and to express yourself more gracefully.
36. In my own personal opinion at this point of time, I think that authors, when they are writing, should not get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words that they don’t really need.
37. Foreign words and phrases are the reader's bete noire and are not apropos.
38. Who needs rhetorical questions?
39. Always go in search for the correct idiom.
40. Do not cast statements in the negative form.
41. And don’t start sentences with conjunctions.
42. Avoid mixed metaphors. They will kindle a flood of confusion in your readers.
43. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
44. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
45. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
46. Be more or less specific.
47. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement, which is always best.
48. Never use a big word when you can utilize a diminutive word.
49. Profanity sucks.
50. Last but not least, even if you have to bend over backward, avoid clichés like the plague.

Stylish Inauguration Speech

Fifty years ago, on January 20, 1961, thousands of visitors converged on Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of our 35th president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. A blizzard had struck the eastern seaboard that day. The streets of the capital were clogged with snow and stranded automobiles, but the inaugural ceremony went on, and a new president delivered one of the most memorable addresses in American history.

What makes President Kennedy’s speech so unforgettable is its striking use of parallel structure–the repetition of grammatical forms to emphasize similar ideas. Let’s look at four brief excerpts from that famous inaugural address that exemplify the president’s powerful use of parallelism.
The address begins with this clarion-call sentence: “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom,” immediately followed by the tandem participial phrases “symbolizing an end as well as a beginning, signifying renewal as well as change.” The echoic sounds of symbolizing and signifying enhance the parallel “as well as” prepositional phrases.

Two paragraphs later, Kennedy proclaims: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

Here the new president gathers momentum with two prepositional phrases, “From this time and place, to friend and foe alike,” and then launches into five adjective phrases–“born…, tempered…, disciplined…, proud …, and unwilling . . .” And the first four of these adjectives are modified by parallel prepositional phrases. The 81-word sentence ends with parallel adjective clauses–“to which this nation is committed and to which we are committed today ”–and prepositional phrases–“at home and around the world.”

In the next sentence, after a brief parallelism of two balanced adjectives, “whether it wishes us well or ill,” Kennedy employs five parallel verb-direct object constructions–“pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.” The alliteration of pay/price, bear/burden, and friend/foe is capped by survival/success.

Toward the end of his inaugural address, Kennedy declares: “So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” Following the balanced noun clauses–“that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof,” the new president utters the memorable “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” Here the powerful “Let us …” clauses are marked by chiasmus, a rhetorical term that involves the effective transposition of key words–in this case negotiate and fear.

Near the conclusion of his address, Kennedy again employs chiasmus to craft what is probably his most enduring statement: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” In this ringing passage, each sentence begins with a direct address–“my fellow Americans” and “my fellow citizens of the world," and the two chiasmi–“country … you” and “you … country”–work their magic with four parallel noun clauses–“what your country can do…, what you can do …, what America will do …, what we can do ….”

I do not contend that President Kennedy’s oration is so unforgettable solely because of its parallel structure. But would we remember his message as vividly if he had said, “You shouldn’t worry about the things you can get from your country. Instead consider how you can contribute to America”?

Writing for the Ages

When he was eighty-nine years of age, the Greek tragedian Sophocles (496-406 B.C.) was brought before a court of law by his son, who sought to have the playwright certified as suffering from senility. In his defense, Socrates stood before his judges and read passages from Oedipus at Colonus, which he had lately written but not yet staged. The court dismissed the case.

This piece of literary history demonstrates that many writers who have reached a certain age have produced impressive works of literature. At age eighty, former Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham won a Pulitzer for her best-selling autobiography, her first and only book. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe completed his immortal Faust when he was eighty-three. Helen Hoven Santmyer was eighty-eight and resided in a retirement home when she gave the world And Ladies of the Club. Sarah and Bessie Delany wrote their first book, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First One Hundred Years when they were one-hundred-and-three and one-hundred-and-one respectively. Four years later, in 1997, Sarah published On My Own at 107: Reflections on a Life Without Bessie.

A life of hard labor that began at the age of eight deprived George Dawson of an education for ninety years. He never learned to read until one day a recruiter for a local adult-literacy program knocked on the door of Dawson’s home in Dallas. ”I figured if I could lay a railroad tie as well as any man and cook as well as any woman, I could learn to read as well as anyone else,” said Dawson. He overcame his initial reluctance to reveal his illiteracy, telling himself, “All your life you’ve wanted to read. Maybe this is why you’re still around.”

George Dawson learned not only to read; at age ninety-nine he wrote his life story in Life Is So Good. He'd come to know the Scriptures years earlier, but, wrote Dawson, “Now I think about God smiling when He hears me read.” He died at one hundred and three, the year that he earned his GED.

These golden literary accomplishments illuminate one of the happy aspects of language in general. As our experiences with language and life deepen with age, we can become more skillful and sensitive in working with matters verbal.

But like any skill, our languaging benefits from use and practice. Just as we can add muscle to our bodies even when we’re in our nineties, our brains grow stronger with aerobics of the mind and pushups of the brain. So get out there and exercise your verbal muscles. Solve a crossword puzzle. Read a book. Keep a journal. Join a writers’ group. Give a talk. Try out for a play. You’ll almost certainly lead a richer and longer life.

Senior Best sellers

Here are a dozen American authors, fifty years of age or above, whose novels have become annual best sellers during the past fifty years. Match each author in the left-hand column with each book in the right-hand column.

Each number in the left-hand column signifies the author’s age during the year or years (signified in the right-hand column) when their novel or novels swept America.

Answers

1. g 2. f 3. b 4./5. d 6. e 7. j 8. i 9. h 10. a 11. k 12. c

A Mark Twain Centennial

This year marks a century since the death, on April 21, 1910, of the most American of American writers, Mark Twain. On the night before that passing, Halley's Comet shone in the skies as it made its closest approach to the earth. Just a year before, Mark Twain had said to a friend: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. . . . The almighty has said, no doubt, 'Now here go these two unaccountable frauds; they came in together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that."

In My Mark Twain, published the year after his dear friend's death, William Dean Howells wrote, "Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes–I knew them all–sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one other and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."

Just as Abraham Lincoln helped forge our identity as a truly united United States, Mark Twain gave a young nation a voice to sing of itself. His stories and essays are suffused with an unalloyed American folk poetry freed from the straitjacket of literary prose. Twain wrote in his notebook, "My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everyone drinks water." Has any other writer ever tapped as deeply the easy grace and direct simplicity of American speech?

Twain held strong opinions about a passel of subjects, and he possessed the gift of being able to state these views in memorable ways: "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." "Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." "It's easy to give up smoking. I've done it many times." He also had a lot to say about style, literature, and the American language that he, more than any other writer, helped to shape:

On American English, compared with British English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company, and we own the bulk of the shares.

On dialects. I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.

On choosing words. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

More on word choice. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and rejoice in it as we do when the right word blazes out at us. Whenever we come upon of these intensely right words in book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry.

On style (in a letter to a twelve-year-old boy). I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English–it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; and don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.

On using short words. I never write metropolis for seven cents when I get the same for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same for cop.

On the first-person-plural pronoun. Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use the editorial we.

On clichés. Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him,

On grammar. Perfect grammar–persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak. Many have sought it, but none has found it. . . . I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by rules. A generation ago I knew the rules–knew them by heart, word for word, though not their meanings–and I still know one of them: the one which says–which says–but never mind, it will come back to me presently.

On spelling reform. Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

On literature. A classic is something that everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read.

On reading. The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

On dictionaries. A dictionary is the most awe-inspiring of all books; it knows so much. . . . It has gone around the sun, and spied out everything and lit it up.